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Around the Web Digest: Week of May 24

Happy Sunday! Did you know the Spanish word for “pansy,” pensamiento, also means “thought,” just as in the French? I bet you did; you’re all so clever. If there’s anything you want me to share with our readers, send me the link at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

In A Hobby Anthropologist Dissects the Tribes of the Upper East Side, the New York Times pans Wednesday Martin’s new quasi-ethnography on the elite women of the Upper East Side, Primates of Park Avenue. The Othering tone of the title calls to mind “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” but without the famous article’s self-conscious awareness of this tendency in anthropological writing. While she appears to have more of an anthropology background than the NY Times gives her credit for, the work sounds superficial and, according to the review, gender-biased in singling out women for criticism.

In response to a popular article by Savage Mind Carole McGranahan, Allegra Laboratory explores the advantages and disadvantages of bringing children into the field in Redux: #Fieldwork with Children.

Similarly, a brief but intriguing chat on the Leiden Anthropology Blog traces some of the more distinctive aspects of “studying up.” The thought that studying elites is different from standard/classical anthropology because they talk back should be a bit troubling, right? From Beyoncé to Markets – Anthropologists Studying Elites

According to this post on Connected in Cairo, while US American entrepreneurs tend to imagine the business world as characterized by chaos, Egyptian entrepreneurs tend to think of the ebb and flow of business as more structured and entrepreneurs as the heroic innovators who stay ahead of these cycles: Corporate Mortality and the Culture of Failure

This post on Language Log, enigmatically entitled Water Control, contains the following manifesto: “If one doesn’t know Chinese language and writing, one should avoid pontificating about the esoteric meaning and complex construction of characters. If one doesn’t know Chinese literature, one should refrain from quoting Chinese proverbs, unless one has proof that they really originated in China, and one should avoid attributing a quotation to such-and-such a Chinese sage unless one knows the source of that quotation in the actual works of that particular sage. Otherwise, one is liable to make a fool of oneself and undercut one’s own argument.” I was particularly drawn to this post because a speech at my recent commencement ceremony made my fellow anthropology graduates and me grit our teeth by beginning, “There’s an ancient Chinese proverb…”

See you next week!

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Rebecca Nelson is the executive director of América Solidaria U.S. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as opening up new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge).